Migratory Bird --Week # 13

When you cease being a tourist, get a full time job, study, pay life expenses, borrow money to eat at the end of the month, you start living a life. And ever since I’ve begun living that life, I haven’t had much time to reflect on my decision to teach abroad. This evening the weather was neither cold nor hot, there was a pleasant breeze by the water fountain. The kids were playing by the temple when I, for a few seconds, arrived at this thought: my most precious investment is traveling and shaking new hands, climbing new rooftops, and making love to different ideas. And no one captures this better than my beloved Sohrab Sepehri, the migratory bird:

Life is that strange sense possessed by a migrating bird
Life is a train's whistle reverberating in the sleep of a bridge
Life is seeing a flower bed from the enclosed window
of an airplane
Life is feeling the moon's loneliness
Life is a flower raised to the power of eternity.
Life is the earth multiplied by the number of our
breathings.

Where ever I am, let me be,
the sky is mine.

Sohrab Sepehri
Trans. Karim Emami